Late to the Party

Sometimes you don't realise you're late until you turn up.

The first time I arrived in New Orleans, at six o'clock on a Friday night, the party was already in full swing and I was perhaps just a little too sober to feel like I was going to have as much fun as everybody else. Despite my best efforts I remained that little bit too sober throughout the weekend and it only slowly dawned on me, weeks later, that arriving a few hours earlier would not have made any difference: I should have got there fifteen years ago.

It seemed to me to be the place a young man could pleasantly do himself some serious liver damage, if he had the time to spare. The problem was that I was no longer that young man and the gaudy revels of Bourbon Street did not appeal to me any more than the ever-present concoction of scents that followed me along its length: a sickly, putrescent perfume of too-sweet alcohol, vomit and bleach. Stately, prim America, the country that, God help it, had once banned alcohol, seemed to need a place where excessive, outrageous behaviour would be tolerated, where folk could act up and get the craziness out of their system before returning to their respectable day-to-day lives. I come from a country with a strong tradition of weekly binge-drinking, but I saw things in the French Quarter that would have shocked me on a Saturday night after a Wales home game in Cardiff: tourists slumped insensible in doorways at nine o'clock in the evening, vomit plastered across the sidewalk, strip bars open for business in the afternoon sunshine as parents and children sauntered by. I'm no prude, but America surely is - and such sights only made it clearer that New Orleans was somehow culturally beyond the reach of the rest of the United States.

And yet, at the same time, this is just one street. Move one block above or below Bourbon and the licentiousness, the neon, the raucous noise that passes for blues music, it all but disappears. By night, the rest of the Vieux Carré is darkness and quiet, secrets and shadow. Amongst the stream of tourists in sports shirts, there is another crowd, another clientele, as different to them as Oberon to Bottom. The men are tall and greying, immaculate and cool in suit and tie despite the languid heat; the women, beautiful and discretely bejewelled. They slip through the darkened streets, into private courtyards on Dauphine St or Saint Phillip, they drink at the Pelican Club and they leave nothing but their evident sophistication behind them. I admit, I tried to follow but, rather like Bilbo chasing faerie rings in Mirkwood, I stumbled in the darkness as they vanished before me.

It was tantalising. These people, I decided, were a link back into the past, to a long lost zenith because this is, without doubt, a city that was once wonderful. Much like my first view of New Orleans, seemingly floating on the surface of Lake Pontchartrain, it reminded me of Venice - both were once important, wealthy, centres of culture. Now they are largely populated by the people that come to gawp at the remains. Whilst Venice is literally kept afloat by tourism, New Orleans (or at least the French Quarter) seems to be an undead corpse, reanimated by the daily influx of new blood. 

The more I thought about it, the more I realised that not even fifteen years would have made much difference. I should have come to New Orleans two hundred, two hundred and fifty years ago, when the party was at its height. I became worried that I would never be able to enjoy the city, always feeling that I had missed out on either its heyday or my own; forever late to the party.

Needless to say, I went back there just this week and had a completely different experience.

For a start, I took my wife and kids: there wasn't any reason why we should wander the length of Bourbon Street. What's more, the clemency of March is different to the humidity of September - and a cool rainstorm had forced the worst of the drunks and vomit off of the sidewalks the night we arrived. We did different things. We took the street car up towards the zoo, along Charles St and back along Magazine and Camp, through the Garden District and the antebellum houses, which eschew both the colonial stylings of the French Quarter and the dreadful concrete drabness of the modern city. Back in the Vieux Carré, Jackson Square and the cathedral were Disney bright.

We all had a lovely couple of days. We ate good food and enjoyed a drink or two. For my part I think I benefited from lower expectations; but something else happened to me - happens to me - in New Orleans. These two short visits have revealed it to be a place of countless opportunity. There's something about the French Quarter, again it's something that reminds me of Venice: as if historic versions of the same city were piled upon each other through multiple invisible dimensions, intersecting through time, like a boozy French-American Narnia.

It means that it will always be worth coming back, because each time it will be a different experience. The party just rolls along and all we can do is dip in and out.

I feel it keenly throughout this return visit: just as I am seeing the city differently, it is seeing me differently. Multiple versions of me walk these streets beside me, unseen, accompanied by friends and acquaintances, people I've known forever and not yet met. School mates and old girlfriends, colleagues, family, friends, grown-up children, grandchildren of mine, they all link arms and pull me around the unchanging corners of New Orleans. Sometimes we're a crowd, cackling at our own jokes, sometimes just a pair of friends or lovers, hand in hand, threading through the languorous shadows. Whoever you are, whoever we're with, I can see how the city wraps itself about us, mysterious, mischievous, playful, always pregnant with booze.

It could be any time. Satchmo might be playing as we drink; the steamers and showboats might be plying their trade on the river as we wait in line for beignets at Café du Monde; it could be last week, one, two, three hundred years ago, or tomorrow. You and I, we drink, we laugh, we dine. The lights twinkle in the galleries and balconies as we slip amongst the tourists and disappear into secret courtyards on Dauphine St or Saint Phillip, closing shutters against a mortal storm that threatens, but never arrives - always the justification for another drink and never the end of the party.

All right, if you insist on visiting New Orleans in the present day, and without me, book a table at Sylvain before you get there. And when you do, drink their Dominique's Departure cocktail. And then, or some other time, head on over to Frenchman Street and drop by the Three Muses. Eat whatever you like, it's all good.

But that time you and I went there? We drank The Muse - don't laugh, you chose it and I reluctantly agreed that it was perfect. It looked ridiculous, do you remember? But elated, full of food and shining with gin, we stepped outside afterwards into the night, jazz trumpet all around us. The stars glittered in the death-black sky. I looked at you, something profound on my mind, but you just smiled, an insane grin, and I clean forgot what I was going to say.

It's that sort of a place.

New York, New York, New York...

My life is pretty great. Occasionally, for example, I get taken to New York. My wife has to go there for work often enough that I get to tag along, sneaked on as hand baggage, maybe as often as once a year. A perfect storm of air miles, baby-sitters and opera commitments hit last weekend with the upshot that I found myself in Manhattan with a whole Sunday to waste as I saw fit.

The problem, at least for someone who occasionally blogs about travelling, is that the more often I visit somewhere like New York, the less remarkable it is. I'm past the initial shock, but still many years away from Proustian remembrances. I'll never be cool enough to be blasé about Manhattan, but I am beginning to accept that it is a real place that I can walk around and explore. Given one free day by myself, I'm not swamped with the frenzied pressure of a tourist, desperate to see as much as he can before he leaves. It's a nice position to be in. But I wouldn't have thought to write about it: a sign I might be starting to take it for granted.

I began with breakfast with my wife at Doughnut Plant on W 23rd Street. This place must be amazing because I don't even really like doughnuts that much. It was her recommendation and (not unusually) she was very right. At 8am on a Sunday, the place was beautifully quiet and the Meyer Lemon Yeast doughnut was absolutely delicious: the perfect glaze cracked as I took a bite, like paper-thin ice on a half-frozen pond. The dough was light and sweet and, to my relief, I realised it was a 'made with' not a 'made from' situation with regard to the yeast. I'm not the greatest coffee-drinker in the world either, but I was able to gulp down their Valrhona Mocha effortlessly, like it was spring water. Not a bad way to start the day.

And then she had to go to work (oh dear) and I had to while away the day until she would be finished. I had made a rough plan which I quickly threw out of the window. Very slowly I made my way to the USS Intrepid, moored at Pier 86, 12th Avenue and 46th Street. It's a WWII aircraft carrier that served at (possibly) the biggest sea battle ever: Leyte Gulf. Today it houses all sorts of military aircraft, as well as a Concorde and the space shuttle Enterprise. There's also a Cold War submarine, USS Growler, that was armed with nuclear cruise missiles and told to sit off the coast of the USSR. I viewed stopping here as tidying up - my boys had already seen it all without me on a previous visit so I had the perfect excuse to whiz around for an hour by myself.

Aircraft carriers are impressive things but I think I enjoyed the submarine most of all. America is good for subs: we've seen the USS Pampanito in San Francisco, HA.19 in Fredericksburg, and U-505 in Chicago. This one was very good: full of old school dials and switches, things that have been designed to go demonstrably 'clunk' when they are pressed - quite an important feature when one is messing about with nuclear missiles. The thing I really liked about Growler was that it provided a technological snapshot. Intrepid served for decades and was refitted again and again, masking her original capabilities, whereas Growler, commissioned in '58 and out of service by '64, was made obsolete almost immediately by the advent of Polaris missiles.

Enterprise, the first space shuttle (built for atmospheric test flights only) is still under wraps following Hurricane Sandy, but we've seen her already at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center) back in 2010. (Washington now has Discovery, whilst Mission Control Houston only gets a dodgy mock up handed down from the Kennedy Space Center, which has Atlantis. Don't get me started.) And then Concorde. I had never seen one up close before. Certainly never flown on one. (Let's be honest, the closest I've got is this.) It's a beautiful machine, surprisingly small and delicate but with incredible, alien-looking sweeps and flourishes. It still looks futuristic, like something Derrick Meddings would have dreamed up for Gerry Anderson. On another day, with more (or less) time to spare, I'd have poked my nose around inside, but I was keen to move on.

I've been around the Metropolitan Museum of Art before. Or at least, I've spent some hours inside it and seen some of the enormous and amazing collection. But I knew I hadn't even scratched the surface. I seized the opportunity of a long afternoon to try and get some more of it under my belt. I'm not going to give you a gallery-by-gallery account of everything I saw, but I spent the time well. Even better, there are still rooms and rooms of stuff to go back and see in the future.

I surprised myself by enjoying the period furniture, mainly because the Met does such a good job of contextualising it. They recreate whole rooms and salons, brilliantly evoking the whole culture and not just showing a table or a chest of drawers. I don't know why this should be, but the experience is rather more pleasant here than it is plodding around actual stately piles in England. Perhaps because there is none of that stuffy resentment of a home being made available for viewings, the peasantry being allowed to gawp at how their betters live. Recreated inside a New York art museum, these spaces are appropriated for an international public and largely shorn of the divisive nature of class. The paintings are good too and, being alone, I was able to zoom along, only bothering with the ones that compelled me to stop and stare, which is by far the best way to deal with an enormous collection.

But when I do eventually bring the kids here, the first room I will take them to is the armoury. It's not an intimidatingly large exhibit, but there are some very nice pieces and, although they have a bloodthirsty purpose, they do qualify as works of art in their own right. If you don't believe me, check out the hilts on the rapiers next time you're passing through because they are as swish as you like.

And then, like always, Henry VIII turns up. Twice.

Henry VIII is unavoidable. He is the gouty uxoricidal axle around which English history spins. Every thing that happens before leads to and is neatly drawn together by his reign; every thing that comes after starts with him. So I wasn't surprised to bump into him in Manhattan at all. He materialised in the form of two suits of armour, each made for him at a different point in his life. Before we look at them, let's just spend a moment exploring a long held theory of mine: Henry VIII has a lot in common with Elvis.

Both kings, obviously, and also musicians: Henry was accomplished with the lute, a 'talented player of the virginals' (Frankie Howerd face) and composed tunes, but probably not 'Greensleeves'. Elvis built Graceland and hung out with Richard Nixon; Henry built Hampton Court and Nonsuch and wrestled with the king of France. But there's more - two beautiful-looking young men, full of talent and vitality who let it all go to their heads and their waistlines and became all fat and rubbish.

So this is essentially Henry VIII's '68 Comeback Special suit of armour:

 

And this is his rhinestone onesie, dead-on-a-toilet suit of armour. 

Not convinced? Here's the clincher: Henry's last words were (allegedly) "Monks, monks, monks!". If that doesn't make you think of this, then I don't know what else to say.

Anyway, I have become rather sidetracked. I started writing this because I wanted to mention how nice it was just to be in New York. Nice to be somewhere full of people, mostly young, mostly impossibly fashionable and beautiful, all going about their Sunday in the winter sunshine, either citizens of the world idly gawping at the skyline or native New Yorkers heads down, pacing purposefully. Nice to be somewhere cold too, with everyone wearing hats and coats. I had forgotten, living in Houston as I do, that there is a simple pleasure to be had sitting in a bar or coffee shop and watching people as they step through the door, their skin red and rosy, their frozen faces breaking into smiles as they see their friends, their eyes alive with the anticipation of warmth and comfort and, just maybe, a Meyer Lemon Yeast doughnut.

The Curse of Jiig-Cal

One day, at the end of what used to be called the Third Form, I was called into the office of the Head of Lower School for what turned out to be an exit interview. In just a few short minutes I would no longer be his concern, but there was just time for one last piece of pastoral oversight. Glancing at that year's report he mildly averred that I wasn't too bad a student and that I would probably get into university if I didn't muck everything up. This was an exciting and important revelation - until that very moment I had no idea that university was even hypothetically on the horizon. I was still getting my head around this news when he asked me what I wanted to do beyond higher education, by which he meant that, having just started to dream about a degree, I should already have chosen a career.

I was fourteen years old. I had not been thinking about career choices. I had been spending most of my time trying to work out who should have been High King of the Noldor following the Ruin of Beleriand and, no, that isn't a euphemism. So I prevaricated.

"Medicine, or law?" I said, but vagueness was something I was not going to be allowed to take with me to Middle School apparently. This was the time to make Decisions.

"Which is it?" he pressed. I flipped a coin in my head. 

"Soliciting," I said firmly. 

The Head of Lower School might have raised an eyebrow at that, but I didn't notice. "Good," he said, gently washing his hands of me. "I'm sure you'll do very well at that."

That was the second and least helpful piece of careers advice I had received. Much more useful had been a conversation I had had with my mother when I was six. She had firmly told me that no, I did not want to become a spy because if the Chinese caught me they would rip out my fingernails. I was immediately persuaded and that's why I am not a spy today.

Then in the Sixth Form the school made a final attempt to help me choose a career. We were made to answer questionnaires that were fed into a computer and then, just many weeks later, we got back a dot-matrix print out with a list of suitable jobs. This was a Jiig-Cal test. It looks like it's a little more sophisticated now than it was back in 1993. At the time it was a little underwhelming. 

The results came back: a list of jobs that could be summarised as 'indoor work, no heavy lifting'. I think the highest matches were librarian, journalist, teacher, but none of it was very revelatory or inspiring. It wasn't until many years later that I realised that I had wanted something very different from this test. It had given me a list of jobs that overlapped with the sort of tasks I did well at school. What it hadn't done, what it would never be able to do, was unlock the dreams and desires I didn't know I had, to show me potential paths that I still had time to take.

Today I have the best job in the world but I do, occasionally, get sudden insights into careers I might have pursued had I but known they existed.

Five Jobs I Would Have Loved, Had I But Known

1. Marine Archaeologist. To be honest, what with the Mary Rose and For Your Eyes Only, this was staring me in the face the whole time and I just didn't see it. All I can do now is gnash my teeth at the missed opportunity. Okay, I can barely swim and I have a potentially crippling fear of deep water, but I am convinced that I could have overcome these if I had but realised such a job existed. I may, even now, have only a sketchy idea of what being a marine archaeologist actually entails, but I imagine it's mainly spending summers splashing about the Mediterranean, hoovering sand away from amphorae, which would be brilliant. My prospects might have suffered when I refused to explore the abyssal wrecks of the Atlantic or the chilly waters of the North Sea but, on the other hand, I might have discovered something like the Antikythera mechanism. And whenever people asked me what I did, I'd get to say "I'm a marine archaeologist," which would be just so cool that the very thought of it makes me all excited.

2. Nail Varnish Shade Describer. It never occurred to me this was a job until just the other day when I went to the shop to pick up some nail varnish for my wife. This made me slightly stressed. Firstly, it is impossible to resist the suspicion that the women in the nail varnish aisle think you are buying it for yourself. Which would, obviously, be fine, but I'm not and there's no way to casually announce that I'm not without turning into a sitcom character (not Ross from Friends, a different one.) Secondly, the labelling is appalling. How am I supposed to find the one particular shade? The rows aren't labelled, the bottles are all mixed up and so the only way to search through them is to pick them all up one at a time and find the name which is helpfully printed on the bottom. Of course, this merely compounds the first problem, because now it looks like I am browsing for a colour I like rather than assiduously hunting down the one out for which I have been sent. 

Anyway, it was as a result of all this that I discovered the joy of nail varnish shade descriptions. I don't know if it's true for all makes, but the particular nail varnish my wife was after is made by OPI and they have some wonderfully silly ones. Some are dull and some are awful, but many are delightful; my favourites: 'I'm Not Really a Waitress', 'Catherine the Grape', 'Bastille My Heart', 'Mrs O'Leary's BBQ' and 'Melon of Troy'. After a while a very clear picture emerges. It is a picture of a room full of clever men and women brainstorming puns, wordplay and terrible jokes with which to describe the colours of nail varnish. This is their job, the lucky so-and-sos, and I would have loved to have done that. 

3. Run My Own Opera House. This is obviously a lie. I couldn't do this at all, and I probably couldn't even imagine half the things one has to do in order to keep such an organisation intact on a daily basis. But I do know a load of people who could work together to run an opera house for me whilst I had very long lunches and, every so often, planned out a season's worth of unworkable and unpopular shows. I may be talking myself out of a job, but I feel I must admit that opera and I are often at cross-purposes with each other. For example if ever there was an opera which deserved a swash-buckling heroic victory at the last minute, it is Tosca. (Oddly, I have the opposite reaction with Rodelinda where I fully expect the drippy royals to get it in the neck and SPOILERS they don't.) Instead, the sudden final tragedy of Tosca leaves me with a strong desire to cut the third act completely. Or, even better, Tosca jumps and then a splash of water appears over the ramparts and she calls out 'Fortuna meglio la prossima volta, perdenti!'. How would that not be brilliant? 

It is with a Calvinesque sigh that I realise that, when it comes to opera, I probably shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a position of responsibility. Anyway, video games are much better: in Assassin's Creed, your character can sneak into the Castel Sant'Angelo, kill the big baddy, fight all the guards and then leap from the battlements wearing a parachute given to you by your friend Leonardo da flippin' Vinci. Puccini really missed a trick there.  

4. Duke of Norfolk. I went around Arundel Castle in the Summer and good fun it was too. Many British castles are crumbling ruins. They may be atmospheric and beautiful, but nevertheless they are merely ghosts of buildings, rent and wrecked by sieges and long abandoned by whatever ancient lords and ladies were once ensconced there. Arundel is the other kind of castle. It is immaculate, luxurious and not conserved but maintained: those ancient lords are still living there, nine hundred years later, and for roughly half that time it has been the home of the Dukes of Norfolk. Not metaphorically either: even today it is their actual home. 

Now pay attention because the aristocracy are tricksy and confusing. For a start they never live where they should do. The Earls of Pembroke lived in Wiltshire, the Duke of Devonshire's house is in Derbyshire and Arundel is in Sussex, not Norfolk. But the Dukes of Norfolk are also the Earls of Arundel so this, at least, makes some kind of sense. The current one, Edward Fitzalan-Howard, is styled the 18th Duke of Norfolk (although he's actually the 25th man to hold the title) and, as well as being the 36th Earl of Arundel (or the 17th depending on how you count it), he is also the 16th (or 36th) Earl of Norfolk, the Earl of Surrey, Baron Beaumont, Baron Maltravers, Baron FitzAlan, Baron Clun, Baron Oswaldestre, Baron Howard of Glossop, the Earl Marshall, the Hereditary Marshall of England and, according to some, the Chief Butler of England. 

Walking about Arundel, two things occurred to me. Firstly, there seemed to be an awful lot of overlap here. Given the current rates of unemployment, was it fair for one man to do all these jobs at once? Couldn't some of these titles be shared out amongst the jobless? Don't Surrey and Norfolk suffer from having to share an Earl? And secondly, I realised that I never will be a duke of any kind. The realisation came like a slap across the face, and it depresses me more than you can know. I can't play football, paint or invent things; I could never be a millionaire businessman, or a statesman, or an actor. These things require not only talent but furiously hard work. On the other hand, I know I've got what it takes to be a bloody great duke. I would be brilliant. I'd knock it out of the park. The best ever. Sadly, it won't ever happen. 

5. Pope. I understand there's a vacancy and, let's face it, I'd be a wonderful pope. Even though I'm not a woman, I still think that I could bring the fresh-thinking and unexpected qualities that any moribund two-thousand year old institution desperately needs. And if for some CRAZY reason you consider my atheism a drawback (it's not, it's what would make me a bold and brilliant choice and allow the Church to move in a new, modern direction) then I'm still eminently qualified. Not only do I have grade B GCSE Latin, but I also have a passion for travelling around the world telling people how to live their lives. 

I'd have to negotiate terms quite carefully, though. I'm happy to work all Easter (it's literally just another weekend to me) but I would need Christmas off, obviously. And if Benedict XVI can invoke centuries-old precedents then so can I, which means that my marriage and vow of non-celibacy shouldn't be a problem. The good news is that, even were I to fail to persuade the Conclave of my suitability, I could just call myself Pope anyway like this guy. 

So there we are. Five rather nice jobs that I won't ever get to do, for reasons that still remain unclear to me. At least I still have all my fingernails. 

 

Pushing the Kids Out of the House

It is the most stressful time of day: the final four minutes I spend trying to get my boys out of the house so we can walk to school and be there before the bell. I make it stressful, deliberately, because otherwise we would never get anywhere. The boys have no instinct for time yet. They don't notice the seconds rushing past them, they never glance in agitation at the clock to check if they're on schedule, so I must badger and cajole, urging them to finish their breakfast, clean their teeth, put their shoes on. All the time I am trying to remember how to make a packed lunch (something I seem to forget in my sleep every night) whilst getting myself dressed and ready.

This morning these four minutes end up being nearer ten, which is tiresome - partly because it raises the chances of us being late (we are never late, and there's another five minutes of contingency after that, but I never dare admit this to myself lest I am tempted to use them), but mainly because, having laboured to create a sense of urgency with which to propel my kids from the house, I don't have many higher gears left. If something goes wrong now, I only have two or three shades of exasperation and anger at my disposal before I have to go nuclear.

And something is going wrong. My eldest, I know, is looking for something and not finding it. I can tell because instead of stuffing his lunch box in his bag and putting his coat on, he is stood there in the corner of my eye, waving his arms and going red in the face as he makes a strained growling noise. In short, he is copying what I do when my keys evaporate, or my phone somehow inexplicably isn't in my pocket. It's one of those countless instances when I see, plainly and clearly, that I have ruined him by being his father.

[Now, don't panic - this isn't something I agonise about. Luckily, I realised very early on that this was my job. Once you accept that, as Larkin put it, "They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do. / They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you." then some of the stress of parenting dissipates. Since everyone is a mess of some kind or another, to be a good parent is simply to screw up your children in the most well-intentioned and loving way you can.]

"What have you lost?" I don't ask this nicely, supportively. We are Late For School and so I am Cross. Also, he is Not Looking. He is huffing and waiting for the Thing to reveal itself, unable to see what he has in his hands. The futility of this as a non-process, a waste of time we don't have, moves me closer to actual rather than manufactured anger. I push in front of him and begin rifling through paper and firing off questions to discover what the Thing is, where it is supposed to be, when he last had it. His answers, vague and often contradictory, push me over the top into wide-eyed frustration.

As I start an increasingly well-worn tirade against disorganisation, my youngest son turns up and he isn't ready either.

"Where's your coat?" I snap. Despite the lateness (we should have left already), he can't leave without it - it's the coldest day of the winter so far.

"Well," he says, "I think I must have left it at school."

And this is when I lose it.

[Because I front-load my stress into these few minutes, the rest of the day is relatively easy-going. When I go and collect my kids I am relaxed and calm. The conversation my youngest and I had yesterday went like this:

Me: Hey how're you doing? How was your day?
Him: Fine.
Me: What did you do?
Him: Nothing.
Me: Have you got all your stuff?
Him: (spotting his lunch box at the last minute) Yup!
Me: How about your coat?
Him: Yep, it's in my bag.
Me: You sure?
Him: Yes, I'm sure, Dad.
Me: Good!

And I let it go at that, because I know they have to learn to be responsible and, hey, he says he has it - I have to show I trust him, right?]

"What do you mean you left it at school! You told me you had it in your bag! I asked you 'Have you got everything? Have you got your coat?' and you said 'Yes Dad it's in my bag!'"

"Sorry," he says, but as always, the regret is only that he is being shouted at, which I find especially infuriating; if nothing else, they should have learnt to fake contrition. But now I have gone nuclear, there isn't anywhere else to go, and so I can only savagely roll my eyes and fetch his other thing-which-is-sort-of-a-coat-and-will-do-this-once and wrestle him into it and then push them both outside, reaching back at the last possible moment, like Indiana Jones, to whisk my keys off of the table before the door closes.

And so we leave for school, seven minutes later than I would like, five minutes later than we normally do, and we will eventually arrive with at least five minutes to spare. My manufactured White Rabbit impression has exploded into real anger, unnecessarily so given that a) it's not actually that cold after all and my youngest's coat will be in his classroom and b) if the missing piece of paper isn't in my oldest's bag (and it almost certainly is) then it is, after all, only a form that he can fill in afresh in two ticks.

But now I am trapped inside the crossness and so the lecture continues as we pace along the street in the winter sunshine. I feel I have to make them take responsibility, to get them to be organised and efficient. I start to say that I know what it's like to get caught out, but I can't have that conversation right now. Because really, of course, this is only partly to do with them and still quite a lot to do with me, and hypocrisy is the official language of parenting.

I was very badly organised at school. Being terribly lazy too only compounded the problem, but the worst thing was being able to get away with it so often. Although we did still get in terrible trouble occasionally, it seemed worth it overall: not having to work hard all the time was consolation for being hauled horribly over the coals every now and again. I say we, because my friends had much the same attitude. As we got older it all got harder; the stress of being caught out worsened, the deadlines slipped further, the risks got higher. At GCSE we would write our Biology homework in the class immediately before it had to be handed in. We would have meetings with the fearsome History teacher on the progress of our A-Level coursework where we looked him straight in the eye and lied about having done any work at all. For Eng. Lit. we were supposed to have translated The Miller's Tale into modern English over the Summer so that we could go around the class in turn, reading out chunks from our own versions. The game here was Chaucerian Roulette, trying to predict whether your turn would come up during the next lesson, and maybe, if you miscalculated, trying furtively to peek ahead and scribble something down on the sly. By the time I was at university, I was trying to bluff my way through nerve-wracking one-on-one tutorials on, say, Bleak House or Ulysses where I'd only read the first chapter. I'm still not sure how I got through my final year, but somehow, despite my best efforts, I just about held it together, which is another way of saying I'm grateful for the degree I got, rather than bitter about what I might have achieved if I had actually, you know, done any work.

All these years after the fact, these begin to sound like exploits in my head, and a lost piece of paper and a temporarily mislaid coat feels like small beer - both reasons why I can't reminisce at the boys whilst I am cross with them for being disorganised. But really I don't want them to end up the same way. I don't want them to be like me. I 'd much rather, in this respect, they were more like their mother, who is brilliantly efficient. (When I first reached for an adjective to put in there, all I had were 'über' and 'ruthlessly', which just goes to show my prejudice. The same bias would have me described as 'heroically slapdash', so there, that's how far from the path of reason I have wandered.) Even if I say she's brilliantly efficient, I'm actually underselling her because, to me, it is more like she has super-powers: judgement, foresight, clarity of thought and word, and many more, some of which are, to be honest, beyond my comprehension. All I know is, she can always find the thing in the fridge that I can't see for toffee.

As we dart through the school gate, hopelessly on time (on my return journey I'll pass many, many children who are going to be actually, properly tardy), my oldest takes a breath to steel himself. Words leap from his mouth, like an ejecting pilot.

"DadI'msorryyouneedtosignmyagendaIforgottoaskyoulastnight," he says, and this is more of the same. His Agenda is a diary the school gives him, a daily planner in which he is supposed to make a note of what homework he has to do and what homework he has done. His teacher asks that a parent initial this every day to check the kids are on top of things. After some previous lapses I have made it clear that I expect him to remember to ask me to sign it, not the other way around, and that he should be doing this in the evening once he has finished his homework rather than just as we are trying to get out of the door the next morning.

He breathes out, and glances at me sideways, genuinely nervous. But I surprise both of us by laughing. At some point during the walk to school, in the middle of my angry rant, he had remembered about his Agenda. How it must have sat in his stomach as he waited and wondered how much crosser I would get. And then the realisation that he had no choice but to come clean. I laugh because I can see he felt he had nothing else to do but throw himself on the grenade and hope for the best, or worst. It's no less admirable for being an act of desperation. Having been lucky in the past, I know what should happen next: sometimes, instead of an explosion there's a giddy absolution as the problem is suddenly magicked away.

That's another bit of my job. It's all very well lecturing on personal responsibility, letting them struggle so they can claw their own way out of trouble, nagging at them so they get their work done and teaching them to submit to the tyranny of the clock - it might even be necessary - but it's not any fun. Much nicer when I get to fix things, when I get presented with problems I can solve, instantly, with my magic parenting super-powers. That is how things used to work all the time. When the boys were much smaller, my powers (in their eyes at least) were greater and the problems were mainly to do with poo, or puréed vegetables, or wooden trains. In any case, back then pretty much everything could be fixed with a cuddle, or a nap, or, perhaps, in extremis, a biscuit. They're nearly teenagers now, and teaching them to fend for themselves is suddenly much more of a priority. The problems are murkier and our relationship is more complicated, constantly transitional. Very gradually, power and responsibilities are going to have to be handed over.

Ultimately, I'm hoping we will all strike a balance where they can have happy, successful lives and still know that we are here for them, just in case. But it's sobering to realise that, in trying to push them out of the house in the morning, I'm also pushing them out towards an adult world where they are in charge of themselves.

"Yes, of course I'll sign your agenda," I say happily. "Is it in your bag?"

"Yes," he says. And it was.

Sandy Hook

by a3_nm on Wikipedia

When we first moved to the US, and I started blogging, I thought I would write about guns. I never did. I didn't want to talk about them. Not when I found bullets stacked like candy at a checkout; not when my kids came home from a play date talking about how their friend had showed them all his rifles; not even when the father of one of our friends was murdered whilst out jogging. Not after Fort Hood, or Tucson, or Aurora. I still don't want to write about guns now.

I took my kids to school yesterday morning, as usual with no other choice than to expect that they would still be alive when I came to collect them. My kids were calm and happy and so, it seemed, were all the other children. The parents and teachers, however, were not. I saw in their glassy, tired eyes what I felt in my stomach: a layer of grim resolve that had crusted over the mess of sickening horror and helplessness. We easily exchanged fake smiles and happy greetings, like toy money for wooden food. The other parents and I were all in the same boat, trying to carry on normally, not to show how scared we were. God knows how the teachers were coping, how they had got through the weekend. I wanted nothing more than to hug every one of them, but of course we were putting on a show of strength, denying our vulnerabilities for the sake of the children.

I'm sure a lot of children are upset, and I don't think that is a bad thing. Mine - and seemingly most kids at our school - are not and this isn't a bad thing either. They were fine all day, apparently. Fine whilst they wrote letters of condolence to an elementary school so like their own; fine whilst they conducted drills, working out how twenty-five kids could hide in a classroom should a man with an assault rifle ever prowl the hallways - all overseen, presumably, by wonderful teachers whose voices didn't crack, whose hands didn't shake.

These women are now front-line protection for our children, because we didn't want to talk about guns.

Although expressly designed to injure and kill, guns would still be awful even if one had never been fired at a human being. Guns are cheating. The destructive power of a speeding bullet has not been earned by the person pulling the trigger; they have not flexed superior muscles, demonstrated greater cleverness or exercised better judgement. Nobody needs such an unnatural advantage, unless they are living in the wilds and plagued by wolves or bears.

If you live in a city, you don't need a gun. They should be banned. It is not impossible - this is, after all, a country that made alcohol illegal if you can believe it, and if you can ban that, you can ban anything. Nobody needs a semi-automatic assault rifle. Walmart doesn't need to sell them. Arms manufacturers can make plenty of money hawking their wares to the armed forces of the world. It can be done, if only those people who are obstacles would stop thinking of themselves as victims, put the guns down and step away.

The Price of Failure

You might not have noticed, but I spent the last thirteen months watching and writing about all twenty-three James Bond films and now it is over. I've been left a little bereft and contemplating life without 007. For a bit. Until Skyfall is released on DVD anyway. But this made me think, what about a world without James Bond? What if he hadn't been there to foil those all those dastardly plans? What if his absurd luck had run out half-way through a movie? What would the consequences have been? Luckily, we are about to find out.


Dr No

Evil Scheme: The eponymous villain wants to disrupt US rocket launches. Why? I can't remember, it was fifty years ago!
You Only Live Once: The villainous Doctor's obstacle course housed in a ventilation shaft might have stopped our man in our tracks - but it could so easily have all gone wrong for Bond with that spider if he wasn't such a light sleeper.
The Price of Failure: Very little. We know that Felix Leiter's on the case and he even has a boat load of marines with him. Worst case scenario, the US invade Crab Key and the American space programme is delayed a month or two - nothing that an extra few billion dollars overtime wouldn't have soon put right.


From Russia With Love

Evil Scheme: To kill James Bond and discredit British Intelligence.
You Only Live Once: That fight on the Orient Express could have gone either way.
The Price of Failure: In the short term, not much. Would yet another sex scandal have changed British or international politics much at the time? In the longer term though the effects would have been MASSIVE, if only because killing Bond would have meant he definitely wasn't around to save the world thereafter. Without him, as we'll see, the human race would have barely survived the Sixties.


Goldfinger

Evil Scheme: To explode a dirty bomb inside Fort Knox.
You Only Live Once: Several chances here. Oddjob leaves Bond unconscious having lacquered Shirley Eaton and, famously, Goldfinger expects him to die but changes his mind.
The Price of Failure: It's at this point that we must consider the fact that, if Bond is killed on a mission, 009 will replace him, apparently. I think we can agree that this wouldn't make much difference. Firstly, we know he's rubbish and secondly, if he wasn't then he would have his own set of novels and blockbuster movie adventures, wouldn't he. Right, back to Operation Grand Slam. If it goes to plan we get either, a) a catastrophic economic collapse in the West, with Europe having to try and bail out the US; or b) a short-term wobble fixed by something like this, followed by a great big war as the undiminished manufacturing output of the USA was converted into weapons with which to bomb Goldfinger's sponsors (China, yes?) back into the Stone Age, facilitated by Soviet neutrality.


Thunderball

Evil Scheme: SPECTRE holds NATO to nuclear ransom.
You Only Live Once: Very lucky of Bond to make it out of Shrublands alive I reckon.
The Price of Failure: Tricky this one. I think we have to assume that the Blofeld of Thunderball is a gentleman terrorist and that he would not have used the nukes as long as he received his diamond pay-off. The British government are certainly resigned to handing over the ransom and that might have been the end of it (until someone else tried the same trick). Perhaps the crisis might even have led the West to think about disarmament? This might arguably have been a better outcome than the 'win' that Bond achieved - unless the USSR had tried to take advantage or SPECTRE had decided to keep asking for more money.


You Only Live Twice

Evil Scheme: SPECTRE wants to trigger WWIII on behalf of China(?).
You Only Live Once: Bond is half a sleepy roll away from poison on a rope here...
The Price of Failure: Towards the end of the film the USSR and USA are minutes away from open nuclear hostilities, from which we can project that North America and much of Eurasia would have been completely exploderised. Presumably China felt confident about profiting from such developments - but I worry that they didn't realise quite how cripplingly over-budget SPECTRE had gone, what with the volcano lair and the space programme and everything. Maybe, in the after-glow of nuclear armageddon, money might not matter too much in any case.


On Her Majesty's Secret Service

Evil Scheme: Blofeld plans to wangle a pardon and a title out of the UN by threatening to make strains of staple foods extinct.
You Only Live Once: I can all too easily imagine 007 getting his hands mashed up in the cable car gearings and falling to his death. Ew.
The Price of Failure: Two scenarios. One, the world refuses to pay, Blofeld eradicates rice and potatoes and mass starvation ensues. Two, the UN coughs up, the Comte de Bleuchamp swans off into retirement and Bond (assuming he survives) becomes happily married to Tracy. Which of these options you prefer largely defines where you sit on the Bond-fan spectrum.


Diamonds Are Forever

Evil Scheme: Blofeld demands nothing less than total global nuclear disarmament - enforced by his diamond-clad orbital space laser - so he can then auction nuclear supremacy to the highest bidder. Apparently.
You Only Live Once: Bond narrowly escapes being cremated alive.
The Price of Failure: The imminent threat (narrowly avoided by swinging a submarine against a wall) is to Washington DC. The destruction of the federal government of the United States would not have been without repercussions. The loss of data, infrastructure and personnel would have crippled America for generations; states would have been forced to take over federal responsibilities (and powers) for themselves, with many becoming semi-independent nations. In the short term Russian and Chinese cities would be Blofeld's next targets, but I assume someone would have agreed to pay up at this point, though whether any country would be prepared to admit Blofeld afterwards is an interesting question. But perhaps Ernst has thought of that and is planning to move to the Moon?


Live and Let Die

Evil Scheme: Kananga wants to destabilise the USA by getting it hooked on heroin.
You Only Live Once: Crocodiles, definitely.
The Price of Failure: A great big uptick in American drug-users in the early Seventies would have been unfortunate but would it have lasted? It's not as if little San Monique would have been able to resist a War on Drugs, so re-supplying his new punters would have been a nasty problem for Kananga - assuming he was still alive by then and that the existing organised criminal forces in America hadn't already dealt with their new competitor. The long term impact on the USA would have been bleak, with a whole generation blighted by addiction, and with the taxpayer lumbered with all the additional social costs of crime and so forth. With Kananga out of the way, no doubt the mafia would have sought to take advantage of the new commercial opportunities, putting further pressure on US law enforcement, further corruption of US government and institutions and prompting more farmers in developing countries to try and meet demand instead of growing food. On the plus side, little chance of World War III.


The Man With the Golden Gun

Evil Scheme: Hang on. Either Scaramanga wants to kill James Bond, or his mistress wants Bond to kill Scaramanga, or both, or China wants to harness a new form of solar power during an international energy crisis. It's not entirely clear.
You Only Live Once: Shot dead with a golden bullet, or stabbed in the goolies by Nik Nak.
The Price of Failure: I'm still unsure about this, if only because Bond's successful recovery of the Solex doesn't seem to dramatically improve life in the West that much (not much evidence of massive solar energy infrastructure in subsequent films). So maybe if Red China had got their hands on it, nothing much would have changed either? Who can say? What we do know is that if Scaramanga had killed 007, the man with the Golden Gun, China and the world as we know it would all have been utterly destroyed in the very next film.


The Spy Who Loved Me

Evil Scheme: Sick of humanity, Carl Stromberg decides to trick the USA and USSR into nuking each other so that civilisation can be rebuilt below the waves.
You Only Live Once: I can't decide which is more implausible: that Bond can be expected to have known about the trick floor in the lift, or that Amasova should change her mind about shooting him. Sadly neither of these moments come early enough in the film for Bond's demise to allow Stromberg's plan to succeed. So we're left with Jaws or (most plausibly) the Lotus developing a catastrophic leak.
The Price of Failure: This is yer standard Bond Cold War apocalypse. Stromberg remains convinced that no human society will flourish on the surface so he obviously doesn't rate China's chances of survival. He does though have a plan for underwater cities, which might have been alright. But given Stromberg's crushing misanthropy (he won't even shake hands), does he really want to save anyone? Or does he just want to sit on the sea bed and sulk?


Moonraker

Evil Scheme: Sick of humanity, Hugo Drax plans to poison everyone with orchids. From space.
You Only Live Once: Given the sheer absurdity of his escape, I must proffer the Venetian hover-gondola chase. But then there's also the fight with Chang which 007 conducts with a fragile vial of killer poison in his shirt pocket.
The Price of Failure: Arguably, this would have been the most disruptive of all these foiled schemes. Killing literally all humans except for a very small and hand-picked sample would have irrevocably changed our species and its evolutionary path forever. On the plus side, its unlikely that climate change would have happened as we have experienced it over the last thirty years. On the other hand, the chances of humanity surviving into the 21st century must have been slim indeed. For one thing, Drax seems to have hand-picked a shuttle-load of beautiful chinless wonders to continue the human race and I can't help but wonder just how capable they would prove when it came to taming a wild and unpopulated world, or repairing a space station. For another thing, Drax is clearly off his rockers - what is to stop him having further culls until there is really nobody left?


For Your Eyes Only

Evil Scheme: Top secret Royal Navy technology is pilfered and offered to the USSR. Quite low key really.
You Only Live Once: Ersatz Blofeld should have killed Bond very quickly during the PCS if only he had stopped yapping on.
The Price of Failure: I can't see this being a big deal. Even if the Russians could command our submarines to attack our own cities, I'm sure they wouldn't have done. In the Bond universe of the Seventies, the USSR is much less of a threat than it was in real life. In fact, there seems to be quite a special relationship between London and Moscow, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if the KGB weren't after the ATAC just so they could politely hand it back to M over tea in Whitehall.


Octopussy

Evil Scheme: Let's cut to the chase and just say that frustrated bad Russian General Orlov wants to provoke NATO nuclear disarmament so that he can have a conventional war in Europe.
You Only Live Once: There is no doubt in my mind that the correct response of a tiger, having been told  to 'sit!', is to leap forwards and rip the throat out of any aging spies in the vicinity.
The Price of Failure: Let's assume, for now, that Orlov's plan works. The West panics, disarms and the USSR tanks start rolling towards the Atlantic. Remember that China in Bond's universe seems to be much more belligerent than the one we know, and they're unlikely to have disarmed themselves - so would they let Russia expand so aggressively? But I doubt it would even get that far. I don't think the USA would have abandoned a nuclear deterrent in 1983 under any circumstances, so the Praesidium would end up quietly murdering Orlov and then publicly wringing their hands over the terrible and unfortunate accident in Feldstat.


A View to a Kill

Evil Scheme: Psycho entrepreneur Max Zorin wants to monopolise the manufacturing of silicon chips by causing a catastrophic earthquake in California.
You Only Live Once: It might be unkindly suggested that spending a night with May Day is the thing would most easily have killed our now very elderly gentleman spy.
The Price of Failure: We know that the earthquake would have caused massive devastation and loss of life. But then what? Zorin would start to make a whole heap of money, but surely not for long. We know the British know of his involvement in Operation Main Strike and presumably they would mention this to the CIA fairly promptly? At which point Zorin would wake up with the muzzle of an M16 in his face, and General Electric would start manufacturing their own chips.


The Living Daylights

Evil Scheme: This is a complicated one. Corrupt Russian officer tries to trigger a spy-war between KGB and MI6, get very rich and rearm the Soviet army in Afghanistan. I think.
You Only Live Once: Good thing that cello case didn't fly straight off a cliff.
The Price of Failure: If Georgi's money-making scheme paid-off, well, there'd be one more rich idiot in the world. But everything else would have had greater consequences. Bond's death, especially if it was thought the KGB were responsible, would have dramatically soured the cozy relations between London and Moscow, possibly even leading to a Cold War. Meanwhile, the USSR might have been able to turn its new high-tech weaponry into a military advantage in Afghanistan, defeating the Mujahideen and securing the country as the southern border of the USSR. I doubt this would have prevented the collapse of the Soviet Union, but it might have been bolstered somewhat. It would have prevented the rise of the Taliban, and stopped Afghanistan becoming a centre of global Islamic extremism in the '90s. After the USSR disintegrates, Afghanistan instead experiences a civil war between secularists and fundamentalists, the former supported by Moscow and the latter weakened and lacking experience following the defeat of the Mujahideen in the late '80s. Let's say the secularists win. As a result there would have been much less radical Islamic terrorism than we experienced, and what there was would have been directed as much against Russia as against America. In short, much less chance of 9/11 and no Afghan War.


Licence to Kill

Evil Scheme: Sanchez' drugs cartel wants to become a global supplier by expanding into SE Asia. Eez bizness. James Bond wants to avenge himself on Sanchez for escaping from custody and maiming Felix Leiter. It's personal.
You Only Live Once: Perhaps Bond should have died when the house fell on him?
The Price of Failure: Not much of consequence here. The attack on the Leiters goes un-avenged, and organised crime gets very organised. Perhaps the opening-up of the Asian drug market would have lead to greater law-enforcement cooperation between China and the US? Frankly, it's difficult to care.


GoldenEye

Evil Scheme: To electronically steal money from the Bank of England and then destroy all the computers and electronic records in London with an EM pulse. From space.
You Only Live Once: Is it churlish to suggest diving after an aeroplane on a motorbike?
The Price of Failure: As this article points out, destroying London as a financial centre would have the immediate consequence of devaluing the pound, making Trevelyan's ill-gotten gains largely worthless. Which is a shame for him as he must have a hell of a mortgage on that secret rising-out-of-a-lake base in Cuba. Britain would be crippled, the world's financial centre would probably move to Amsterdam and the rest of the world would carry on pretty much as normal.


Tomorrow Never Dies

Evil Scheme: Media baron decides engineering a war between China and the UK is the perfect way to launch his new cable news channel.
You Only Live Once: I'm not sure there's any one moment of jeopardy that should have done for our James here, but it is a wonder that Q hasn't rigged one of these cars to blow up out of sheer irritation.
The Price of Failure: This is a no-brainer. The Royal Navy sails into Chinese waters and the People's Liberation Army Air Force bombs the crap out of it, humiliating Britain. China blossoms, full of confidence; the UK sinks into a pit of self-loathing, orchestrated, no doubt, by the headlines in Tomorrow. Carver's network is a massive success and he becomes one the most powerful men on the planet, boo, hiss.


The World is Not Enough

Evil Scheme: Elektra King nukes Istanbul so that her pipeline becomes the only way to supply oil to western Europe.
You Only Live Once: Luckily for Bond the O2 is dome-shaped or he would have gone splat, falling off that balloon.
The Price of Failure: So much for the Solex, eh? Like a neo-con's wet dream, it's all about the oil here - at least, it is once the vaporisation of nine million people and thousands of years of culture have been absorbed. As with the 2011 Japanese tsunami, the disaster in Turkey would have prompted a world-wide panic regarding nuclear technology, with many countries closing down power plants, as well as much hand-wringing over the availability of nuclear matter. So oil and gas prices would rise and there would be more pressure to drill in the Arctic, Antarctic and pretty much everywhere in between. We could expect to see Russia playing hardball with its European energy customers, America involving itself in foreign wars over oil and perhaps increased tensions over territorial disputes where energy reserves had been detected. So, yeah, pretty bad!


Die Another Day

Evil Scheme: Half-baked North Korean ex-pat plots to attack the South with an orbital solar powered space laser.
You Only Live Once: For sheer implausibility, it has to be the laser-escaping, collapsing glacier-dodging kite-surfing.
The Price of Failure: It seems clear that Grave's plan would quickly lead to total North Korean control of the peninsula, killing thousands and destroying towns and cities in the process. But what would be the international reaction? The USA (and other NATO countries) would immediately insist on North Korean withdrawal from the South, but they would be unable to enforce such a demand. China might exert pressure behind the scenes, but would feel obliged to support North Korea publicly, which would leave China and the US at a nuclear impasse. What would Russia do? Traditionally, in the real world at least, one might suspect them to attempt to block intervention in any rogue state but - faced with the power of the solar laser thingumy - they might relent in this instance and back the NATO position in a UN Security Council vote. Even then, without even an abstention from China, the US might feel it had no choice but to act. In which case a trigger-happy President might chance his arm with a nuclear strike in order to try and destroy Graves and the control mechanism. If that were unsuccessful, and it might well be, given that the laser could be used to swat missiles from the sky, then there might be no other course left than to accept the situation and to try and do a deal with North Korea on their terms.


Casino Royale

Evil Scheme: Terrorist banker plots first to make a load of money from a bombing, then to recoup his losses at a game of poker.
You Only Live Once: New Bond, new vulnerabilities. For the first time in ages there is the sense that Bond could die during any of the fights or stunts. Jumping off that crane perhaps? Or grappling with a war lord in the hotel stairwell? He comes closest to death after drinking a poisoned Martini and even needs to have his heart restarted.
The Price of Failure: <Click> goes the reset button and suddenly we are in a whole new timeline, seemingly, and all that stuff above us on the screen never happened. Hey ho. Two schemes here: if Bond had failed to thwart the Skybus attack then Le Chiffre would have made a whole ton of money and ruined an airline. If his poker gambit had worked, he would have also made a load of money for the bad guys. That's all by the by. For us what matters is that if either of these schemes had worked our jolly naive little Bondling would never have suffered, never have met and lost Vesper, never survived to learn the lessons and burst from his Brioni chrysalis as Bond, James Bond 007.


Quantum of Solace

Evil Scheme: Evil consortium Quantum plot to take control of Bolivia's water in order to.. I don't know, actually. Drink it? Put out a large fire?
You Only Live Once: The plummet from the DC3?
The Price of Failure: Quantum is a bunch of ultra-rich, mega-important guys who want to throw their weight around and do whatever they like. There are plenty of people like that in our world anyway and they rarely have anyone stand up to them, let alone defeat them. The best you can say about Bond's 'victory' here is that this time, at least, Quantum don't get away with it. Without his interference things would simply have carried on as normal.


Skyfall

Evil Scheme: Unhinged ex-spy is desperate to take revenge on his former employer, M.
You Only Live Once: Rather obviously perhaps, but [SPOILERS!] Bond appears to run into some insurmountable problems at the end of the pre-titles sequence.
The Price of Failure: Well, this is tricky isn't it. Because [MORE SPOILERS] Silva does manage to kill M and Bond does fail to save her. So perhaps we have to turn this around and say what would have happened if Bond had succeeded? M would presumably have carried on in her job and Bond would have undergone some emotional catharsis from having 'saved his parents'. Which would have been terrible of course because we need him emotionally damaged and orphaned, just as we needed Judi Dench to regenerate into Ralph Fiennes. Maybe M couldn't dodge the bullet, but we - and Bond - definitely have.

* * *

All fun and games, but there's a serious point to be taken from all this. In the old days, Bond was regularly required to thwart gargantuan schemes that would have devastated the world. Faced with the real and obvious threat of nuclear war (something we couldn't, ourselves, actually do anything about), society produced Bond and used him to make us feel better about our precarious existence. This trend continued right through to the end of the Cold War, after which the films had to cast about for other dangers: drugs, media and energy corporations, a smattering of light terrorism, and even rogue states; throughout the '90s Bond remained a triumphant heroic figure, able to deal with all of these worries.

But suddenly all that reassurance has gone: the Craig films have swapped grandiloquent but thwartable villainy for ambiguity and, arguably, futility. There's a tragic and wearying quality to these stories. Some of the threats are familiar (terrorism, corrupt cartels and corporations) but there's a sense in which such problems are just too big for Bond to deal with. It's all he can do just to survive, and there's no longer any expectation on our part that he will triumph. Worse, the forces of 'good' are often complicit, with government officials throwing up their hands or even joining in with the baddies. Does this reflect a tired resignation on our part? Is it that we see the problems we face as insurmountable? I'm worried that the answer is yes and I hope that Bond soon regains his cocksure swagger. And in the real world, without a 007 to save us, we have no choice but to deal with the great threats of our age, intangible and complex though they may be.

We can't afford not to.

Skyfall

There is a problem with watching a brand new Bond film. It's a slight one and, to be honest, it surely only affects people planning on writing up the final entry of a 23 film retrospective. But a problem, nonetheless: Skyfall is so shiny new, so fresh out of the box that, even having now seen it (twice), I haven't yet fully absorbed it. I grew up learning my 007 by rote, thanks mainly to endless TV repeats that forced fights and chases, quips and kisses inside my squashy formative brain. All those viewings accrete over the years; layer upon layer of familiarity and understanding build up and become a sturdy platform. I don't have that yet for Skyfall and the fact that it's not just sat on the shelf with the other DVDs rankles me. Suddenly, my many years experience are gone, my gun hand shakes; yet here I am pushed into the field, too soon.

To be honest after a single viewing, I was a little underwhelmed. Perhaps this was only to be expected. Hype and expectations were at an all time high and I was caught off guard I think by Skyfall's sombre tone. That's not to say I didn't enjoy it, because there is plenty to love. The photography is beautiful, the direction is thoughtful. Craig's Bond is a thing of wonder: vulnerable yet also granite hard, brutal yet charming. Great performances from Dench and Bardem and brilliantly likeable turns from Ralph Fiennes, Ben Whishaw and Naomie Harris to usher in the new regime. Poor Bérénice Marlohe doesn't get much screen time, but in her scene with Bond in the casino she is absolutely excellent - not many Bond women get such good treatment. 

The fight with Patrice is very good indeed, shot in profile, silhouetted against a mesmerising jellyfish light effect, it suddenly, breathtakingly, pivots as the hitman slips out of the window. Silva's introduction is possibly the greatest of any villain: an incredible single shot where the terrorist simply walks the length of the room, recounting his rat story. His 'lair', an abandoned city, is fantastic - surreal and dream-like whilst still utterly credible.

Best of all is the way Bond's character is explored. "Sometimes the old ways are the best," he says when Eve queries his use of the cut-throat razor - but it's only much later that Kincade says the same thing (about another blade) and we realise the old man is the source of Bond's sentiment. Similarly the riddle of Skyfall is dangled before us with the word-association game before being slyly answered by a tracking shot up the drive of a remote house in the Highlands. The retreat to Scotland reveals so much but without being obvious or crass. Unable to defeat Silva, Bond escapes into his own past to find what he needs, recovering his aim and - briefly - even the ghosts of his parents, recast as M and Kincade. The loss of her, his mother figure, leaves Bond renewed as an orphan, ready for adoption by MI6 once more. The final moments of the film are a delicious treat as the original tableau of M's office from DRNO is reconstructed before our eyes. But for all that, I was missing something as I left the cinema - it needed to enjoy itself a little more, needed (I thought) an injection of cock-sure swagger.

I had assumed that Skyfall would mean a return to business as usual for Bond. Casino Royale and QOS demolished the franchise and rebuilt it from scratch, eschewing familiar (and exhausted) elements whilst necessary repairs were performed. After DAD these two films almost had a self-punishing quality, as if the franchise were flagellating itself for past sins. I liked and admired that - it was cathartic; the Bond series was bravely taking its medicine and getting better. But the return of the gun-barrel sequence at the end of QOS seemed to signify that this process had been completed and penance served. Perhaps inspired by Bond's appearance at the London Olympics I fully expected Skyfall to throttle down on the self-doubt, both for the franchise and for Bond himself. Although the film is full of confidence, it is at pains to show in those last few moments that things are only now getting back to normal and a lot of effort is spent shuffling the new personnel into position.

So I went and I watched it again and I realised that the biggest problem was me. I had been too wound up to enjoy it properly, too eager to analyse it. I have enjoyed looking at these movies again, finding new things and having fresh thoughts, but along the way I had ruined myself for a new Bond film. I had trained myself to scrutinise instead of just enjoying it for what it is: a stylish couple of hours of fun and thrills.

I did better the second time, helped along by my fellow audience members. It was a daytime screening, and the theatre was maybe a third full: a mixture of retired people and students, roughly half men, half women, and each of them had paid just six bucks to get in. A casual audience it seemed to me, killing a few hours in a not very busy day; probably not obsessive fanboys who had agonised during the gap between UK and US release dates. It seemed a safe bet that these laid-back Texans weren't watching riddled with homesickness, desperately over-invested and hoping that they weren't about to be let down or shown up. I wanted to know what Bond meant to them, how much they thought he represented tiny distant rain-sodden Britain.

I got my answer watching Skyfall with them. They loved it. They laughed throughout, at almost everything, giggling like school girls in fact during Javier Bardem's first scene. They cheered when the DB5 turned up and whooped when it opened fire. It delighted me that people who were just passing by could enjoy Bond so much. I was swept along and it was wonderful; Skyfall was wonderful. The lights came up and they shuffled off, smiles on their faces. I didn't linger in the shadows. I went with them, out into the bright November sun.

*   *   *

Pre-Credits Sequence: Wonderful first shot of Bond, great bike chase, and a nifty train-top fight, complete with a YOLT style denouement - all rather wasted by making up most of the trailer.  

Theme: Adele's theme is what we might call 'retro' Bond now but that's not a problem. The Bondian chords are all present and correct and the lyric is well above average - but the song itself never takes off. Or rather, it circles round and round but never lands. Pick whichever plane metaphor you prefer, the fact is the song doesn't ever get where it seems to be heading: a roaring triumphant Barry/Bassey-esque crescendo. Having said that, it has an addictive quality: it crawls into your brain and lingers there. And once it has been paired with the opening titles it simply becomes marvellous. Klienmen returns to take charge of the visuals and the result is unusually macabre, with blood, skulls, grave stones and deer heads all featuring. It looks absolutely gorgeous and, although we don't get the pleasing linear narrative of Klienmen's earlier titles, there is something much more complex and ultimately satisfying. The hypnotic song shares a fevered dream-like quality with the images and the combined effect makes these the best Bond titles ever. Yielding new meanings with repeated viewings, they reach back into the past (showing Silva enduring his horrific injuries) and finally present us with looming portents of the future as the lyrics and images combine thunderously 'at Skyfall'.  

Deaths: Absolutely no idea. I wasn't even counting. Maybe when the blu-ray comes out I'll sit down and work it out, but I hope I don't. 

Licence to Kill: Okay, I can't actually resist. Just tallying it up in my head it might be around... loads. Twenty plus maybe. 

Helicopters: 1. So, there should be a direct correlation between the craziness of a Bond film and the number of exploding helicopters it features. But there isn't. Whacko Moonraker has none, whilst dour old-school FRWL does. But generally it holds. Brosnan racks up 7 in four films, whilst Lazenby, Dalton and Craig can only muster 1 between them. It's this one. 

Shags: Two. Neither of them, thankfully, Moneypenny or M. It is entirely possible that Bond and Eve did do some sex whilst in Macau, but it is explicitly not referenced at all, so we can decide for ourselves. A much cleverer 'have-you-cake-and-eat-it' solution than the one they thought up for DAD. 

Crimes Against Women: Poor old Séverine does not have a good time but, apart from her backstory, nothing happens to her just because she's a woman. Moneypenny is shown to be effective and resourceful, even if she does get teased for shooting Bond. Dench's M, possibly the greatest Bond woman of them all, gets a wonderful farewell.

Casual Racism: Insidiously, all the goodies are British and all the baddies are foreign, whilst ambiguously good/bad Severine is played by French/Chinese/Cambodian Bérénice Marlohe. 

Out of Time: Non-Brits might not be aware, but in 2012 the UK has been basically governed by public inquiries and committees like the one that grills M here. But 2012 is also the year we all stayed home and enjoyed/endured the Queen's Jubilee, the London Olympics, Andy Murray's Wimbledon final and so on - in short, for many Brits there was more than the usual amount of running around on the Underground or staycationing in Scotland. Throw in Silva's not so subtle nods to Wikileaks/Julian Assange and this couldn't be any more contemporary if it had this week's lottery numbers in it. 

Fashion Disasters: Silva's beige prison outfit is a crime in itself. Craig pulls of a beardy Bond (just about). But more often than not I found myself wowed by the outfits. Bond's suits match the immaculate levels of Goldfinger. The dresses, particularly the gold one Eve wears in the casino are beautiful. And say and what you like about IMAX but it really showed off the weave on some sumptuous knitted-silk ties.  

Most Shameless Advertising: There was a great deal fuss made about Bond drinking Heineken but for heaven's sake, beer is hardly the most unlikely product endorsement 007 could make is it? After all, it is alcoholic. And it is very a much a tiny beery drop in an ocean of booze, as this wonderfully comprehensive guide explains. The green bottles are blatantly brandished by Bond and Tanner, but there's something more shameless about an advert that masquerades as justifiable dialogue: chasing after the train in Turkey Eve swerves to avoid a sudden obstacle and M asks her what it was. "VW Beetles I think," she replies unnecessarily. 

Eh?: It hardly matters, but most of the story is nonsense. Why does Silva plan to get captured and escape? If he has the resources to blow up MI6 and everything else, surely he can fly to the UK himself and kill M with ease whenever he likes? We're told that Silva has planned his revenge so meticulously that he has anticipated his capture, but how can he organise things like tube trains turning up on schedule, or dictate the time and place that a Select Committee will meet? How on Earth does he get so far out of his cell that he can take out the guard before he's shot? Who are the men who assist him in London? How does he communicate with them or plan with them so efficiently that they are walking along carrying a police disguise at exactly the right moment? >> How does the Shanghai assassination work? Patrice shoots him dead from across the street, but nobody reacts when it happens. If they are all in on the hit then why pay Patrice millions of euros to do it?The target is already alone in a room with Séverine and her heavies - if she wants this guy dead she could do it herself. >> The committee that calls M before it would appear to be the Intelligence and Security Committee - but in real life this is a parliamentary body, i.e. all those involved are either MPs or Lords. Clair Dowar is definitely an MP, but what is Mallory? Surely no sitting member of either House could be made head of MI6?  >> Not really something that doesn't make sense, but the thought of Bond and M stopping off at a Little Chef on the A9 is as unavoidable as it is bizarre. 

Worst Line: "I always hated this place," says Bond aloud to nobody as his childhood home goes up in flames, as if he were a character in some cheesy action movie. Similarly, his, "It just occurs to me that we haven't been properly introduced," to Moneypenny at the end feels very leaden.

Best Line: Difficult to remember any stone cold one-liners despite lots of good dialogue. Kudos to Dame Judi for immaculately dropping the series' first F-bomb. 

Worst Bond Moment: The death of his parents - astonishing that we've only now stopped to consider it.  

Best Bond Moment: Adjusting his cuffs; kicking the gun off the floor and catching it; taking out Silva's goons on the island. Then we get wonderful images: Bond stood beside his DB5 with glinting musical sting or, even better, standing in the boat on his way to the casino. Craig's been working on the standing and has developed a signature pose that is repeated all through the film: legs planted firmly apart, shoulders back (of course), left hand thrust into his trouser pocket, the right arm loose but ready. Once you notice it though he seems to be doing it all the time. The dazzling, amazing quality of his Bond is how he comes alive when he speaks to women. Normally blunt, brusque and cold he transforms in to a creature of charm and twinkle. Remember the receptionists in Casino Royale and QOS? We get the same here when he talks to Séverine in the Casino and it's wonderful to watch. 

Overall: A very good Bond film that manages to be about the loss of his parents without hitting us over the head with it. My favourite moment is the shot of the house that finally reveals the significance of 'Skyfall' - understated but so important and everything clicks into place. Nods to the franchise's past are subtle and pleasing, and a lot of the story has an authentically Fleming-esque flavour. I suspect that, rather like the Macallan, Skyfall will get better and better with age.    

James Bond Will Return: with pleasure.